


Trespass

by Maur



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Body Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 06:30:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16403084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maur/pseuds/Maur
Summary: Zhenya likes to poke his nose into other people's dreams.





	Trespass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HoneycombHenry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneycombHenry/gifts).



The dark spaces between human knowledge are smaller than they were; but like silt on a riverbed, the accumulation of facts and truth take centuries to dam up the flow of dark water. And not dissimilarly, the rivers lead to oceans whose abyssal depths can never be filled with the careful models of reality that humans like to build. Moving in the currents, sinking away from the light, falling into a darkness so complete you can feel your pupils ache as they stretch ever wider, the weight of the sea crushing in on your ribs - there is nothing to hold on to.

The ancient magicians could tell you that when you are only a human mind in the infinite blackness, only will carved to a blade by years of ascetic devotion can slice through the darkness and lead you to your destination. And to return home again, through the icy night, is a challenge that even the strongest heart can quail at.

A thousand years ago, when the people of the Urals wore furs and rode horses, Zhenya's will - his stubbornness - might have had him one of the wise men, who defended his people from the threats that breathed just outside the firelight, waiting for the unwary to cross into their realm. 

Now, true night is almost inaccessible, as humans lit greater and greater fires against the darkness and drove its denizens to deeper and wilder abysses. So Zhenya turned his will to hockey, and his stubbornness drove him to cross a more tangible ocean and find a babbling sea of strange customs and behaviour, incomprehensible people who speak assorted foreign tongues and make strange and imperious demands on him.

"Just try it," Gonch said, wearily, and Zhenya wrinkled his nose. "It's a Canadian thing, I expect. He'll be hurt if you don't even try it."

Sid was determinedly proffering his plastic box, and inside it asymmetric bars of unnameable substances were crumbling with every shift of his hand. If you didn't look too closely, it was as if they were squirming and shedding of their own accord.

Zhenya looked into Sid's wide, hopeful eyes, searching, and as always, his gaze slid right off those gold-brown irises. Perfectly ordinary eyes, except that Geno couldn't sense a single thing from them, and that was both unusual and irritating. 

"Fine," he said, because otherwise Sid might stand there til Doomsday. He put his hand into the box, and picked up a crumbly bar. Sid beamed at him, and Geno took a cautious bite.

It had chocolate, and custard, and biscuit, and his teeth felt gummy as he chewed. It was good, he decided, and he smiled stickily at Sid, who smiled back and said a series of things in his monotonous voice.

"Canadian sweets," Gonch translated. "Tell the Canadian media you liked Nanaimo bars, they'll love it."

Zhenya had no intention of talking to the media, but it was nice to have something to fend them off with if they caught him. He smiled at Sid again, and said "Zankyo," as carefully as he could. 

*

Sid's dreams were closed to him, as well. At first he didn't notice, but gradually he realised there was one face he never saw. He drifted in and out of the team's dreams carelessly, carried by the tides of the dreamworld. Most of them never noticed him, the very human ones; those that caught a glimpse wouldn't question seeing the rookie in their dreams. 

Not all the team were very human, though. Other blood ran in human veins, and you couldn't always tell whose.

"I see you," Flower said to him, when he first crossed the threshold into Flower's dream. It was lush with green plants, a bright spring morning with the dew still burning off, and Zhenya found that he was mostly naked, bare limbs painted with some kind of flaking clay in strange patterns, only a clout of animal skin held by a belt covering him. Flower was a strong, vivid dreamer. The plants that Zhenya crushed underfoot released pungent unfamiliar smells, and he wondered if they still existed in the waking world, or were only ghosts, called into being in dreams.

He hoped the clout was animal skin. The shape of the form under Flower's knife suggested other options, red and raw with flies eddying around it when Flower stepped away.

The blade he carried was curved and wicked, much like the smile Flower turned on him. He was crowned with a wreath of leaves and his legs bent oddly, the thighs too short and the heels where the knees should be, bending backwards. He had a short bare tail, like a stubby rat's tail, that twitched.

This was not what Flower was, Zhenya knew, but it was the shape of something that grew through Flower's blood and could only bloom in dreams. A being from the dawn of the world.

"Are you going to use that knife?" he said, and Flower shrugged, smile unwavering. They understood each other, here in dreams, not having to speak through their shared second language or a translation that passed from Flower to Max to Gonch to Zhenya.

"You'd be fine, it's just a dream," he said, and tapped the tip of the knife against his cheek, leaving a thin line of blood. "Come see the stream." He turned towards an area of thicker woodland, dense with vines and shadows.

Zhenya followed him, skirting the fleshy lump in the grass, which still shuddered as if taking silent, agonising breaths. Flower's strange legs took long strides, and Zhenya had to hurry after him, the forest clinging to him with the coiling tips of ferns and brambles. The grass turned to moss, a vivid poison green that released cool liquid around his toes with every step.

It was worth it, though, to see the lovely tumble of the cataract into a tiny pool. Dragonflies hovered over it, sparks of blue and green, and Zhenya wished he could take a photograph. Flower's feet clicked on the spray-shined rocks, and Zhenya decided not to look at them but to lean over and see if there were any fish.

There were no fish. A livid face gaped up at him with empty sockets where teeth and eyes should be, and when Zhenya drew back, Flower was very close to him, the blade somewhere between their bodies.

"You're up to something," Flower said, still cheerful. "You've been sniffing around the dreams for days. What do you want?" Geno weighed his options, and Flower breathed gently against his cheek, the scent of raw meat gushing out of him. "You're in my dream now, fucker."

Zhenya took a breath, tasting the heavy sweetness of blood, and then turned so he was nose to pointed nose to Flower. His eyes had oblong pupils, like a goat's, and Zhenya could read ancient bloodlust and friendly curiosity running side by side in him. 

"Fuck off," he said. "Use that knife on me and I'll fill your pads with shrimp. I was just, I wanted - I was looking," and he hadn't had to explain himself to anyone in a while, had been able to stay mute and look confused while the world flowed on around him. "I want to see Sid's dreams," he blurted, "And you're his favourite, so..."

"Oh, I see," Flower said, and gave him a sharp shove, so he slipped on the wet moss and plunged into the water up to his shins. He didn't feel the round shape of a skull under his feet, but the surface under his bare toes felt uncomfortably squishy, and he hoped that the flickering, fluttering sensation around his ankles were fish after all. "You're prying."

"Yes," he said, shameless. The rocks were too high behind him to climb out, and Flower was before him. He could flee the dream entirely, but he wasn't going to run from Flower if he could help it. "I can't read Sid at all, and I want to. I can't find his dreams, either, and I've looked. I've walked through the dreamworld right into his bedroom and breathed in what he's breathing out, and I still can't find a thing. Doesn't he dream? Everything dreams, doesn't it?"

"Nosy," Flower said, and then sprang at him, knocking him back against the rocks so hard the breath was driven out of him and his head rang from impact. A shaft of sunlight caught the blade, and Zhenya's eyes widened as he watched it rise. "But I like you, Geno, so here you are. Here's what Sid dreams of." 

The blade came down, lodging in Zhenya's shoulder, a bright cold pain in the hollow between his collarbone and the thick cord of muscle above it. It drove so deep he thought he could hear air hissing out from his lung. The crescent moon of Flower's blood-spattered teeth was all he could see as Flower lowered him into the water, turning him facedown. The tiny fish flickered across his vision, and he shut his eyes tight, terrified of their hunger. The water already tasted of iron, from his own blood or a previous victim's.

He had to wake up.

"Well, look then," Flower said, and pushed on the back of his head. "Go on. You wanted to see, didn't you?"

He wanted to see. He opened his eyes, and stared down, through the coiling ribbons of blood, which twitched with every hammerblow of his heart. The pool was far deeper than it should be, far deeper than it had been when he stood in it, and when Flower pushed again, Zhenya sank into it, drifting slowly down like a weighted corpse, bubbles of air from his lips or his wound swirling about him like veils.

There was a city there, down in the depths. At first he thought it was something tiny, a lost doll's house of a thing, but he fell and he fell, and the water around him grew darker but the city still retained its own sullen yellow light, like some Victorian lamp seen through thick fog. The grip of the water tightened on him, pushing him down and pressing up against him. He would be crushed, were his body truly flesh and not dreamstuff. Even so, it was not comfortable, and each breath of salt water dragged at his lungs like the end of a bag skate.

The city grew and spread, until it occupied all he could see, from one undersea horizon to the next. The buildings differentiated themselves from a black mass into separate domed and dark and windowless structures, only the narrow paths between them lit with some strange light that did not separate into points of illumination even as the city was close enough Geno could make out the curved apertures into each building. He drifted over the city, some little distance above its humped backs, and then a great shadow fell over him, and even the lights below him seemed to dim. The water he breathed seemed to ice over in his lungs, and he knew that some great terror was near.

He looked over his shoulder - up - and between him and the surface was a shape far vaster than a whale, its edge not the sleek delineation of some sea-going mammal, but the tattered edge of a horrror that had never known the sun. It was pale underneath, with dark slashes that pumped water through its titanic body. 

They seemed to blink at him, and for a second he saw the gleam of wet liquid eyes looking out, and he turned his head around as fast as he could, reduced only to hoping that whatever it was, if he did not look at it, it would not look at him. He was a tiny speck to it, not worth its effort, and he put it from his mind as firmly as he could, for to think of the great nameless horrors that dwelt in the darkness was to invite their attention.

He focused instead on the city, the streets and buildings that seemed now very familiar and normal thing, suggesting beings that lived and traversed their own streets and made homes. He followed what seemed to be a wide path, lit in smears of yellow and orange-yellow and white-yellow, towards a wide open space populated by strange shapes that made his belly tense and his mind flinch, trying to make some human sense of the hunches and the extrusions.

But his mind did make sense of it; the movements of alien limbs echoed those of humans, strange extremities looped around familiar tools, the struggle and push of strange wills was that which Zhenya had seen a thousand times before.

Here, on the sea bed, lit by some nameless fungus of algae, the citizens of this black city were playing hockey.

*

Probably it was not actually Flower's fault that he injured his shoulder next game. At worst, the dream had been a shadow of the future, and not its seed. But it was hard not to glare, sullen, when Flower sat beside him at breakfast the next day and placed a shiny red apple in front of him like a witch in a fairytale.

"Sorry," he said, his eyes bright with regret and defiance. Zhenya started to shrug, and then hissed in pain. There was no point in Flower sitting beside him; they couldn't speak. He wasn't sure he'd have discerned _sorry_ if he hadn't been expecting it.

But where Flower went, Max followed, loud and incomprehensible but with friendliness in his eyes and his manner, and after Max there was Sid, frowning at their choice of table but choosing to stick with his preferred breakfast companions rather than the table nearest the door that he usually insisted on. Zhenya looked at Flower, who gave him a smile that wasn't sharp at all as Sid began to talk in that slightly strained way that meant he was trying to complain without actually complaining in any way people could object to.

Zhenya would have liked to ask about the underwater hockey city, but instead he kicked Sid under the table. When Sid stopped mid-sentence to frown at him, eyes opaque and unreadable, Zhenya said, "Shoulder hurt," because it would stop Sid from not-complaining and start him on fussing, which was funnier and also kind of nice. He fetched Zhenya fresh coffee and whisked the last cinnamon danish from under Jordy's nose because he knew it was Geno's favourite.

*

The painkillers helped him sleep, but they screwed up his dreamwalking. He paced endlessly through murky caverns, chasing the flickers of light that danced just around corners. Sometimes he could hear the distant voices of people he knew, echoing back at him. Once he found himself in his mother's kitchen, watching silently as she baked, mixing fast as if against a clock, but every time she turned back to the bowl it was empty again. It was a little scary; travelling so far in his dreams usually took a lot of effort, and it was risky. Or it was risky, if you didn't know how, which Zhenya did, but - he'd done it by accident. He kept to his own dreams after that, the jumbled mutter of his subconscious throwing things together quite enough to occupy his drugged mind.

He was glad when he could step down the dosage, and the dreams were only a little muffled again. He pushed through dreamstuff like hanging spider-silk, and stumbled into Flower's dream again, finding him stalking a young pig through clouds of fluttering gnats and broad-leafed plants.

"It's cute," Zhenya protested, and the little striped pig spun its tail like a helicopter blade and fled. Flower sighed, and made a menacing gesture at Geno with his knife. "No, fuck you, you already killed my pre-season."

"I did not! That was - fuck you, you know that's not how it works," Flower said. "What, you want me to stuff you into Sid's dream again?"

"So it was his dream?" The city had been too huge, too complex, too detailed to be the work of one dreamer. It was a real place, somewhere, and the slow accumulation of thousands upon thousands of dreams had built its double in the strange, tenuous world of the dreamlands.

"Geno, I have tended fucking goal in his nightmare water city because he likes to practise in his sleep. If it's not his dreams I'm definitely mad he made me go there, because it is one fucked up place." There was dried blood flaking at the corners of his mouth. "Tell him you want to do creepy dreamwalking hockey one on one and he'll probably let you in himself."

"He has to let me in?" Zhenya said, and Flower shrugged.

"There's a bloodsharing rite," he said. "I opened the gate with blood, but it was only dream-blood. Ritually share blood with Sid, you'll be able to traverse his dreams as easy as mine, you pushy fucker."

"Bloodsharing?" Zhenya said, and he was very aware of the beat of his heart, echoing through from his living body, the slow steady thrum of sleep. He'd never done blood magic in his life. No one did blood magic. "What the fuck is Sid?"

Flower's ratlike tail waggled, possibly in amusement. Flower's face was all dimples and bright eyes.

"You should ask him," was all he said. "Let's hunt some pigs, eh? They're tasty."

Zhenya declined. You never got good tastes in other people's dreams, anyway. Instead he went to Brooksie's dreams, and sat at his kitchen counter while Brooksie told him all about the nutritional uses of common household objects, feeding each one into a blender as he talked.

*

He had to look up _blood_ and _dream_ in his book. Then he spent a while assembling the words into sentences. _Flower say_ , he could start, and then maybe, _you dream hockey_. And then, _I want_. 

He'd learned _I want_ nice and early; Zhenya had always been the youngest and usually the smallest on his team. _I want_ was useful for those times where you couldn't just shoulder your way in and make room for yourself. It galled him a little he had to ask for Sid's dreams, instead of taking them, but if that was what it took, he'd do it.

It didn't occur to him Sid might say no until he'd let his carefully formed sentences out, and Sid frowned and bit his lower lip. They were in the break room, and Sid was making them both a sandwich, though at this point he probably still thought he was just making himself a sandwich. Zhenya held his breath, waiting to see if he was going to have to fight for this.

"I can't today," he said. "Not today. Thursday? Can you do Thursday?" He liked to repeat himself in slightly different ways when they talked, which wasn't exactly helpful but did give Zhenya a couple of chances to pick out the words. Now, he mouthed _Thursday_ to himself until he realised that it hadn't occurred to Sid to say no, either, that he was just worried about scheduling it.

"Thursday," he agreed, and then, because Sid was okay to talk to, "In Russia, days number."

"Whose days are numbered?" 

"All," Geno said. Sid gave him a sceptical look and said something Zhenya didn't understand before returning his attention to getting the precise amount of mustard on the top layer of bread. "Like, Thursday, is four, Friday is five."

"Oh, right. Saturday is six?" Sid cut the completed sandwich in half, and pushed one half to Zhenya without any prompting at all.

"Saturday mean seven," Zhenya said, and Sid made like he was going to take the sandwich back. "No! Sid!"

"Russian is bullshit," Sid said, giggling, and Geno turned his back on Sid like he was protecting the puck, hunching over the sandwich and stuffing as much as it in his face as he could.

"English bullshit," he mumbled around chunks of turkey, and Sid laughed again,

"I hated learning English," he said, and then he picked up his sandwich and carried it off, saying something about a meeting. Geno was left to consider when, exactly, Sid had learned English. He wasn't one of the French ones, was he?

*

Sid lived in Mario Lemieux's basement. Zhenya turned on all the lights as a protest against the dim, shadowy quality and shivered ostentatiously until Sid brought him a blanket and draped it over his shoulders. Zhenya snuggled into it and started complaining about having to sit on the floor.

"Stop bitching," Sid told him, grinning, and dumped a shiny textbook with a much creased spine in his lap. Zhenya couldn't read a word of it, but it was the Latin alphabet. Sid opened it confidently to a particular page, which had a large diagram on it of some kind of ritual circle. "That's us."

"For dream?" Zhenya said doubtfully. It seemed a lot.

"We don't have to do it," Sid said, and when Zhenya started to protest, he shook his head. "Old way," he explained, tapping the page. 

"Oh," Zhenya said, and looked at the page again. The history of magic involved an awful lot of trial and error; unlike science, the laws of magic were mutable and permeable, so even if something used to work, there was no guarantee it would keep working. Newton would have had a harder time of it if his apples had sometimes floated away, or exploded. The circle on the page looked quite ordinary in structure, but even in pedestrian print, the shapes caged by the lines seemed to throb and shift, crawling at the corner of his vision. "Is, uh - " he consulted his pocket dictionary, and Sid waited. "Is danger?"

"No," Sid said, settling back onto his heels. "I have a first aid kit and I - " the rest was incomprehensible, but by the way Sid was pointing at the two narrow scalpels sitting in a metal tray, he was explaining his efforts to protect them from blood poisoning.

That wasn't really what Zhenya had been getting at, but whatever. Sid wanted to win at hockey, he wasn't going to drag Zhenya into some eldritch netherworld and eat his brain. He'd get into a lot of trouble, too.

They sat opposite each other, the book propped open beside them - Zhenya wasn't sure if the drawn circle was helping, or if Sid needed to refer to it. Sid murmured something under his breath, a fast regular cadence like he was rushing through a prayer. It went on for a while, but Zhenya didn't get bored. He felt as though he could almost make out the words Sid was saying, divine their meaning through ways other than his ears; they seemed to enter his body in other ways, absorbed through his skin or perhaps breathed in as Sid breathed them out. As though his body was slowly processing them, and laying them up in storage, like a meal of protein after a workout. 

He blinked, and Sid blinked back at him; his eyes weren't opaque, they were pools of silt water in sunlight, golden and brown and gently moving. He could feel Sid's presence, cool and clammy - not quite human. No, for all Sid looked human, there was something in him much closer to the surface than Flower's bloody ancestors. Whatever Sid was walked in his skin in waking hours.

"Okay?" Sid said, gently, and Zhenya nodded. He could feel Sid's fondness for him, a tinge of anxiety about the ritual, a hopefulness. It was what he'd expected to feel from Sid. Human or not, if Flower shared his dreams, there was no reason Zhenya couldn't. "Take a knife." He picked up one of the scalpels, and then he hooked two fingers into the corner of his mouth, pressing his thumb into his cheek so it bulged between his lips, pink and shiny. Zhenya scrunched his nose, and one side of Sid's mouth grinned at him even as the scalpel drew a red line on the gleaming flesh. "G," Sid said, mangled, and nodded towards the scalpel dangling from Zhenya's slack fingers. 

He didn't want to make the cut in his mouth - surely the back of his hand would have been fine, hockey players always had small abrasions - but Sid looked impatient and he was hardly in a position to answer questions anyway. So Geno made a small slice in his own cheek, a very tiny cut, and his mouth seemed to flood with iron.

"Good," Sid said, and then Geno realised why it was the mouth, because Sid let go of his lip, leaned forward, and kissed Geno around his fingers, sliding his tongue in between them and sending Geno's stomach into free-fall.

Not that he hadn't thought about it, but he hadn't expected it to just happen, out of the blue.

 _You thought about it?_ Sid's voice sounded inside his head, and when he pulled back, they were both blushing. The connection closed as soon as their mouths parted, mostly to Zhenya's relief. He definitely didn't need to have telepathy with Sid.

His eyes were still open, gateways to his soul, and Geno read a sort of shy hopefulness in them as Sid uncurled his crossed legs and nudged Geno with his foot.

"Yeah," Geno said, and he leaned in for another kiss, feeling a contented sigh vibrate through Sid's chest. Their minds didn't touch again, and that was just fine; there was language enough in their hands and mouths.

*

Playing hockey underwater was a little like a nightmare; like dreams Zhenya had had where he skated slower and slower, limbs heavy and goal receding. The dream water pushed against him with all the insistence of real water, and Zhenya struggled against it and hoped that it counted as conditioning in some way. Perhaps it was mental exercise. 

Sid looked different in his dream, a bit. His skin looked yellower, less pink, though that could have been the sulphurous light. His mouth was wider and his eyes bigger and glossier. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as the way Flower looked, anyway. Whatever Sid was, it had to be close to human.

He still acted human, pushing over the sandy floor like skating sending up slow motion sprays of silt when he turned. Geno wasn't sure if they were weighted down or pressed down by the titanic mass of water above them; he wondered if he was human in this dream, or if he was yellowed and slightly misshapen.

It wasn't always the city, but it was usually underwater. Sid showed him a few memories, undersea caverns, deep ravines, schools of fish like tiny pieces of confetti whirling around them both. He wasn't great at building dreams, usually only managing a few bright snapshots. Zhenya took the opportunity to show off when he could draw Sid into his dreams, building a perfect Magnitogorsk for Sid to explore, drawing on his own memories and the dreamstuff of others to build the parts he'd never seen. A hard trick, but one he'd mastered as a teenager, far from home and desperately lonely.

They talked, too, with the freedom of dreams, the words booming and mangled through the water but still entirely comprehensible. Zhenya asked endless questions about the things he'd failed to understand during the day, and gradually the waking world began to seem a more comprehensible place. He learned the rhythms of the Mellon arena, of the training facility, the habits of his teammates and the routines of the staff. He learned to appeal to Dana for his gear, and he learned to look pitiful at Jen until his media obligations were reduced. Never as far as he'd like, but that was the price of playing the game. Not that he was doing that anywhere but in dreams.

He liked Sid more the more time they spent together, which was just as well, because they were sleeping together whenever they could manage it. It wasn't as often as either of them would have liked. Zhenya would have liked to occupy some dreaming time that way, but Sid was curiously reluctant. Perhaps he didn't have quite the vivid sensation Zhenya did in dreams.

They worked out a pretty good system for getting alone time on roadtrips. Zhenya was pretty sure Gonch knew what was going on, but when it meant he gave Zhenya specific information about how long he'd be gone for and sent a casual text informing him when he was in the lobby, that was fine. They got pretty good at efficiently airing out the room and stuffing Sid back into his clothes and out the door, pink and giggly.

Sid's body was almost entirely human. His teeth - something about his teeth wasn't quite right, Zhenya thought. The joints of his fingers seemed to have a little more sideways give in them that one might expect; perhaps it gave him that incredible dexterity. The way his eyes shone in low light wasn't quite obvious enough to notice, unless you knew. 

And then there was his dick. It wasn't obviously weird. There were no tentacles. It was long and thick and fitted nicely in Zhenya's large hands. It didn't fit so easily in his mouth, but he had a lot of fun trying, even while he noted the taste was sharper, more bitter than he'd expected.

It took a couple of tries to fit it in his ass, but the trying was a lot of fun too. Sid was more experienced at this than him - apparently they got up to some wild shit in Juniors - but Zhenya thought he was keeping up pretty well. Sid didn't seem to have any complaints.

When they were in bed, he couldn't stop himself from thumbing the puffy head of Sid's dick, softer, plusher than it should be. The slit was longer, stretching almost the full length of the already-large head. Sid would try to narrow his eyes, but shuddering little noises always fell out of his mouth when he tried to speak, and Zhenya didn't understand what he was saying anyway. It was never _no_ so it didn't really matter, and Zhenya kept playing with him until Sid got impatient and used his weight advantage to muscle Zhenya into something else.

And then, in a very boring hotel in Calgary, the first joint of Zhenya's thumb slipped entirely inside, and Sid cried out so loudly someone thumped on the wall.

Sid put his hand over his mouth, eyes wide. Zhenya stared up at him, frozen, terrified he'd somehow _broken_ Sid. But when he dared to look down, there wasn't blood, only the slick pink of Sid's body. He turned his thumb, cautiously, and Sid's breath shuddered in his throat, but he didn't protest.

He was - textured, inside. Soft, but with tiny blunt protrusions that dug in to Zhenya's thumb. Like teeth, an unhelpful part of Geno's mind provided; he wondered if Sid could bite. He petted, gently, and thought maybe the tight sheath of flesh was loosening a little.

"Stop, fuck," Sid breathed, and grabbed his wrist and tugged until Zhenya drew his thumb out. It glistened with a pearly substance; Geno thought about tasting it, but Sid was dragging him up for kisses, murmuring incomprehensible things.

"What are you?" he asked later, after they'd fucked and fallen asleep and met in the dark city so Sid could work on his positioning. That was his story; Zhenya suspecting he was trying to train Zhenya into his preferred lines of attack. "Where is this?"

"It's like, an ancestral home," Sid said. He leaned on his stick, which had a twisted wooden handle and very little flex. Zhenya used his own carbon fibre stick, but Sid preferred the kind they used down here. "I've never actually _been_ here. It's too deep. It's, uh. Not a good place for humans - human-bodied things, I guess."

"What are you?" Zhenya said again, and Sid looked up, frowning. Zhenya looked up, too, and saw a vast pale shape moving above them, so low over the city the domes might scrape its belly and send clouds of foul blood through the water of the city. The thought of that blood circulating through his nose and lungs, even in a dream, was repulsive enough to make Zhenya gag, and he covered his mouth. Sid looked at him, his mouth an unhappy twist.

"Maybe it's better we don't talk about it," he said, very diplomatically, and Zhenya nodded, and poked Sid's ankles with his stick until Sid giggled, his wide mouth soft and smiling again.

*

He couldn't just _not know_ , though. If Sid didn't want to tell him, fine, but Zhenya wanted to know. And there was a book that would tell him, if he only knew how to read it. Sid had it sitting out on his dresser, with a tub of hair gel and some odd socks draped over it, and it was as inaccessible to Geno as if it were ancient Sanskrit or Akkadian. 

While Sid was in the shower one day - Zhenya had maybe jizzed in his hair on purpose - he copied down all the words that were on the spine of the book, and tucked the paper away in his jacket. At home, he typed the letters into Google and found the book for sale. He managed to place an order with his credit card, and flushed with success, he ordered a few more phrasebooks and dictionaries.

He got cleared for practice, and then for play, and he forgot about the box of books in the corner of his room. He piled up clothes on it - he and Sid went shopping together, and Sid made clucking noises at the prices of things, and sometimes Geno bought them just to watch him poorly conceal his judging. Anyway, he was getting to have quite a lot of clothes now, and so the box was forgotten until he tried to poke the pile of clothes back behind his bedroom door, and stubbed his toe on it.

"Fuck," he said, and then remembered the book, and he found a knife to slit the tape and pull out the textbook, a heavy flexible weight like a snake with corners. He flipped through the book to about the right place, and began to search.

Perhaps he wouldn't have been able to find the diagram if something in him hadn't _recognised_ it. A feeling like a bell being rung, very deep inside, far down deep where he found the dreamgate. He looked at the symbols on the page, and felt them look back at him.

There were so many words. He had the alphabet down, thanks to Natalie Gonchar, but spelling out each word and then looking it up in his dictionary was a painfully slow process, and he hated it. After a day in the loud and incomprehensible company of the team, the last thing he wanted was more English.

But Zhenya wanted to know, and like many of the curious and willful before him, he pushed on, one word at a time, written in fine-nib pen in the broad spacing of the pages. The academic style was painful; untangling the long sentences with their endless enfolding subclauses made his head hurt. It was small consolation that his written English was improving, as the words he learned would be little use to him.

He read around the diagram; he read pages before, and after. He felt like an ant crawling on a vast stained glass window, seeing the colour change but never perceiving the bigger picture, and longed for the ability to skim the book. There were probably books on the topic in Russian, if he knew exactly what the topic was. The names did not translate.

The ritual circle was to create a bond; well, Zhenya knew that. The sharing of dreams was trivial; Zhenya knew that too. There were deeper bindings that could lash two beings together by use of the circle, and Zhenya could have guessed that, remembering Sid's voice in his head, clear.

It was evasive on the subject of the deeper bindings. Words like _meld_ and absorb appeared, as well as _mate_ and, disconcertingly, _devour_. He was fairly sure Sid wasn't going to eat him. Flower might, but Sid didn't seem the type.

It might be forbidden knowledge, or he might just be unable to understand it.

*

When they played in Montreal, Zhenya took some photocopies to work on. He pretended to be busy watching a movie until Gonch fell asleep, and then he dug out his folder and got to work. There was a very strange passage about a fish that went fishing, which was making no sense at all; he'd have guessed it for an allegory, but the rest of the page didn't seem like an allegory sort of text.

It went on to explain that the fish would find a mate and they would devour each other, which in Zhenya's view was somewhat implausible. There didn't seem much point in mating if both parties got eaten afterwards. Pondering how, exactly, two fish could eat each other carried him into light sleep and the drifting edge of dreams; he blinked back to consciousness already paddling in water, the way he usually entered Sid's dreams.

Instead of reaching inside of him to the blood link, instead of walking his dream-form down the hall and finding Sid's dream through him, he turned east, moving swiftly towards Nova Scotia, passing through hundreds of fine soft dreams that flew apart at his precipitous plunge. It was easy enough to find the eastern coast that Sid lived on, and then he plunged into the water and kept going, the brief dreams of dolphins the only signs of unreality around him. The waking world was shadowy around him.

He didn't really know what he was looking for. Sid had said the city was too far out for humans; that didn't apply to dreamwalking, probably, but he could hardly search the seabed yard by yard.

The great pale misshapen thing above the city floated in his mind for a moment, but he shuddered away; he would not even search for such a dream for fear of finding it. 

He moved deeper through the dark sea, indigo above and the densest black below; it was like swimming in the night sky. Deeper and deeper, other life scarce this deep. Once a shark's pale flank passed close, mind a closed lock. If sharks dreamed, it was in no way humans could understand.

Perhaps the small trace of Sid's blood helped, calling out to the homes of his ancestors. Zhenya didn't find the city, but he found a rough, craggy settlement. Rather than being built, it seemed to have been carved into a great rock outcropping on the seabed, that slanted over a ravine that fell into darkness so intense Geno couldn't bear to look at it. Any beast could lurk in there.

Zhenya reached out, and found dreams in abundance. He dabbled into them, testing their flavour; there was a bubbling anxious sort of dream, here was a pensive shadowy dream, and here - 

_devour_

Here was a dream that felt heavy and desirous, and Zhenya wanted to know about the bonds these creatures had with each other. He pushed gently against the surface of the dream, feeling it stick and pull to his skin, and then it enveloped him and he was tumbling in lighter waters, moonlight slanting through the shallows in silver slices like Flower's knife.

He could hear sounds, reverberating through the water. Loud sounds, high sounds. They might have been screams. Zhenya licked his lips against the cool water, and followed the sounds.

It was hard to make out what was happening. The moonlight etched everything in sharp high-contrast; there were two bodies, one much bigger than the other. The smaller one was screaming, hoarse, as if they had been screaming for some time. Muffled, as if their mouth was partially blocked.

Zhenya knew he shouldn't look. The sating of his curiosity would come at a high price. But he wanted to know, and so he took a kicking stroke, and another, until he could see the melting ruin of flesh that had once been a human being, and the strange creature that it was locked to in a circle of devouring.

For it wasn't just one way. It was the smaller figure whose mouth worked and gnawed between animal shrieks, eating away at slick flesh. But Zhenya knew that under the skin, under the skeleton, the creature was eating the mind and body of the smaller, and would eventually swallow him whole. Perhaps his screams would continue there, trapped under the skin, his voice ringing through flesh and water...

Zhenya reeled away, nausea thrumming in his guts, and he reached for the place that would tow him swift and sure to his body. But he missed; or he had a stray thought that misdirected his will at the crucial moment, or perhaps he went just where he meant to, because he followed the bond of blood and slipped into Sid's dream and onto the ice with him, watched him score and then throw himself into Zhenya's arms, eyes glossy with illucid dreams.

"Sid!" Zhenya said, and shook him. Thank god he hadn't been in the city beneath the sea; anything other than this pink and human Sid might have broken him. Even so, the ice reeled under his skates, and colours strobed when he blinked. "Sid, speak to me!"

"Geno," Sid said, blinking a few times, and he looked up at the scoreboard, frowning. "I got a goal?"

"What are fisherfish?" he demanded, and Sid looked back, mouth curling up a little and then flattening down as he took in Geno's expression. "They're fish, and they mate, and they eat each other."

"Oh," Sid said. He looked pale, now. "Anglerfish. Yeah, they. Uh. It's kind of... complicated. Nature is wild."

"They _melt_ ," Zhenya said, voice high-pitched like it hadn't been since he was thirteen. "He eats her, and he melts, and she - she absorbs him, and he's trapped inside her, and he screams and screams - "

"Geno, what the fuck," Sid said, and he took Zhenya's arms in his hands. They were both out of their gear suddenly, both wearing Pens t-shirts, and Sid's hands were warm and steadying. 

"It's you," Zhenya said, and Sid looked up at him. "You're the anglerfish."

Sid was silent for a long moment. His eyes were pale and bright and startled and hurt. "It's not like that," he said, finally. "It's not - like that, Geno."

Zhenya looked down at Sid's hands on his arms, and had a sudden, vivid image of them melting together, fusing, til the skin was smooth and Sid could never ever let go of him. He flinched away, violently, and Sid recoiled too, eyes wide. 

"Geno," he said, but this time Zhenya got it right, and he crashed back into his body with such speed he almost threw himself out of bed, and Gonch grunted, and said "My turn to get up," before falling back into sleep.

*

Zhenya was shaky and uncertain for the rest of the week. He couldn't look at Sid, who seemed equally unable to look at him. A fear grew in him that Sid had already encompassed some helpless soul, and he was afraid to look in case he saw them peering, helpless, from his flesh. 

It was foolish. He'd rested his head against Sid's chest a dozen times, and heard one steady heartbeat and not a single scream.

He dreamed of the city - his own confused, ominous dream, the city dark and foreboding and incomplete, and over it that great mass of flesh he could not name or describe. In his dream it fluttered and bulged with the trapped forms of a thousand victims, pressing desperately against the skin they were now part of.

Even with his skill, it took a while to free himself of the gummy strands of the dream. There was something in him that wanted to go back, to witness the horrifying shapes and forms, to make himself sick with it. He forced himself out of his own dreams in the end, made his way to Flower's, where the horrors at least seemed - cleaner.

To his surprise, Flower wasn't alone. The rookie D-man with the hair was there, too, wearing clay paint and leather and looking warily confused.

"Oh, it's you," Flower said. "We were just about to cook these." He gestured to the small red shapes dangling from Letang's hand. "Always show up in time for food, huh?"

Zhenya's belly roiled unpleasantly at the tiny carcases, and Flower laughed at him.

"Now, what the fuck did you do to Sid?" Flower said, pleasantly enough, with a certain spark in his dark eyes. "He's moping, and he kicked me out of his dream last night. Said he didn't want to play hockey, which is fucking bullshit. And then he said we should go shopping in Toronto on our free afternoon, when he should be making pathetic excuses to ditch me so he can hole up in a hotel room with you and do kinky shit to each other."

"What, no," Zhenya said, eyes widening. He shot a glance at Letang, who looked inscrutable. Usually that was because he didn't understand what was happening around him, speaking as little English as Zhenya, but now, presumably... "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Fuck you, you're not subtle," Flower said. "I thought your moony shit was annoying, until I got this mopey heartbroken bullshit. He's flopping around like a wounded deer; if I didn't love him I'd probably give in and put him out of his misery." He made a graphic gesture with the knife, and Zhenya winced. "Jury's still out on you, fucko, so start talking."

"None of your business," Zhenya said, keeping a wary eye on the knife. "But - do you know what Sid is?"

"More or less," Flower said. Evasive, but whether he was hiding knowledge or a lack of it, Zhenya couldn't tell. "We're Quebecois, we hear the stories. But I know _who_ he is, which is a person who doesn't deserve you averting your fucking eyes like he's some unclean being."

 _Unclean_ was a good word for what Zhenya had seen in the undersea dreams; he shuddered convulsively, and Flower tilted his head, the glittering anger in his eyes settling.

"Help me cook these," he ordered, and Zhenya obediently took hold of one of the whittled skewers Letang offered, the small corpse impaled and bound upon it. He didn't know much about the anatomy of small animals, so he was able to tell himself the shape of it was probably a normal shape, once you got the skin off. He crouched next to Letang, who gave him a sideways look as he lit the tiny campfire by banging stones together like it was the boy scouts.

"Sid is very unhappy," he said. His voice was soft edged and mellow, unlike the bright shards of Flower's voice. Zhenya hadn't heard him speak so much before. "He won't let me into his dreams at all." The narrow glare made it clear who he blamed for this; Zhenya was willing to defend himself, but he was suddenly overwhelmed with jealousy at the thought of Letang with a mouthful of blood and Sid's tongue. He focused on the small fire, the sizzle of flesh. If he kept ignoring Sid, Sid would probably just get over it and play dream-hockey with Letang and Flower and forget about Zhenya.

He couldn't keep that belief steady even for a few seconds. Zhenya would be right there, after all, on the ice, in the locker room. They couldn't forget about each other and he could hardly ignore Sid indefinitely. He didn't want to; he wanted to go back to the easy companionship of two weeks ago, before Zhenya had pried too far.

"I saw something really fucked up," he said to the fire, and Flower hummed inquisitively. "I can't, I don't - Flower, it was really fucked up."

"Something Sid did?" Flower said, his tone far more gentle, and Zhenya shook his head.

"I was prying," he admitted. "Poking around, trying to find out about his... people, I guess. And I saw. Something."

"Well," Flower said, and scratched his scalp with the tip of his knife. "I mean, humans can be pretty fucked up too, you know. I don't know what you saw, but I find it hard to put Sid together with something so horrible you can't even look at him. Are they cannibals? Because you know, some of us dream a big cannibalism game but we don't actually do that shit. Anymore."

"Anymore?" Letang said, eyeing him, and Flower grinned wide.

"On a species level. I, personally, have never cannibalised."

That was true enough, Zhenya supposed. He'd never worried that Flower was going to eat him. Not in the waking world, anyway.

He begged off actually eating the little shapes; Letang cheerfully disposed of Zhenya's, crunching through small bones with every sign of enjoyment. He looked entirely human; maybe he was just weird.

*

Zhenya tried to touch Sid's arm in the locker room, and Sid flinched, hard, and gave him a look of such hurt misery Zhenya was forcibly reminded of Flower's description of him as a wounded deer. He looked tragic, and Zhenya felt guilt twine around his gut-deep fear.

"Sorry," he said, but Sid ducked his head away and muttered, _whatever_ before scuttling away, taking cover with Jen, who Zhenya was not about to approach. She had a way of presenting him with media obligations as if giving him a nice treat. It made it hard to refuse.

He did always refuse, of course, but he felt bad about it and there was already too much guilt in him today.

He tried again at lunch, but Sid skittered away to Colby, who slung an arm around his shoulders and gave Zhenya a confused but protective look. At least the entire team didn't know they were - doing what they were doing, and having an acrimonious break from that thing.

*

To his indignation, Sid even tried to block him out of his dreams. Zhenya was not about to stand for that; it was, after all, the one place he could really talk to Sid. It was unfair to take that from him. Sid might be able to keep Flower out, but Zhenya had been walking into other people's dreams back when he could only toddle, and he barged into Sid's dream to find it already melting, a hideous mess of running colour and shapes.

"What the fuck," he said, startled, seeing the domes of the city bulge and pop and become slightly lopsided office buildings.

"You're not supposed to be here," Sid said, crossly, folding his arms. Pittsburgh slowly built itself around them, stop-motion and jerky and with blurry gaps where Sid had clearly forgotten what went there. His shitty dream seemed sharply endearing; Zhenya was so gone on him. 

"I miss you," Zhenya said, and it came out plaintive and honest. It had only been a few days, but he'd gotten used to Sid in his space so quickly that the absence of him had been painful. Sid shrugged, though, face mulish, and Zhenya could feel Sid trying to push him out, force the dream to exclude him. "Sid! Don't!"

"It's my dream," Sid said, face flushed and pink. "You don't - it's not _yours_."

That was technically true, but possession was nine-tenths of the law, after all, and that mean Geno had a pretty good claim to both Sid and his dreams. He stood his ground, and the dream grew a little fuzzy and spiky but didn't eject him. Sid had a strong will, but he clearly hadn't practised this much.

The dream started to fray, and Zhenya realised Sid was trying to wake himself up; of course, Zhenya could wait until he slept again, but that would be pretty inconvenient.

"Please, Sid," he said. "I want - I'm sorry. I was nosy and I scared myself. It wasn't fair. You didn't do anything."

Sid half-turned back towards him, indecision all over his face. It went against his nice Canadian upbringing to just ignore an apology, and Geno had seen Max exploit it a dozen times to make him make up, even after Max had stolen all his tape and replaced it with fruit roll-ups.

Which - Zhenya hadn't actually done anything to Sid. Just burst into his dreams and called him a fish. 

"Why are you mad?"

Sid closed up again, hugging himself. The dream remained intact, though, so Zhenya took a cautious step forward, and wrapped his arm around Sid's shoulders, tugging him close enough they touched. Sid didn't relax, head down and shoulders high.

"You made it sound gross," he said finally. Zhenya stared down at his pink neck. Pink, not the usual sallow cast of his dream skin. His mouth had been the wide but not _oddly_ wide mouth Zhenya had learned to expect. 

"You're not gross," he said, because he wasn't really capable of describing what he saw as anything less than a horror. He squeezed Sid tighter, until the tension in him eased a little. "I know you. You're not gross."

"You don't know me, though," Sid said unhappily. "I'm not human."

"You've seen Flower," Zhenya said. "Now he's gross. He skins things."

"But that's what Flower used to be. In another time." Sid looked away, looked back, his eyes creased with unhappiness. It was an unfamiliar expression on him. "The - what you saw - is something I'm going to _be_."

"You're going to hurt people?" Zhenya said, trying to resist the prickle of terror. His arm hairs rose like a cat's. Sid gave him a wounded look. "It's what I saw! It - it was a dream, and the, the anglerfish - " his breathing was unsteady, and he clutched tight to Sid, warm and looking entirely human. "There was a person - a human," Zhenya said, "And he was - he was melting. And screaming. And he was biting, and his - his face was melting - and he was still screaming but his whole mouth was gonna get melted into the anglerfish so he couldn't scream any more but he'd still be screaming _inside_ \- "

"Oh," Sid said. "Oh, G, I'm sorry, that sucks, that's horrible." His arms came up and he squirmed so he could get one under Geno's arm and hug him. 

"And he wouldn't die," Zhenya said in a whisper. "He'd be inside the fish, forever, trapped, and he'd _know_ \- "

"Shh, it's okay," Sid murmured. "We don't do that. What you saw hasn't happened for centuries, I promise."

Zhenya buried his face in Sid's neck and let himself shake a bit. It had been awful, but he could admit to himself the worst of it had been thinking Sid would - could - be a part of that. That it wasn't some distant alien horror, but something he'd let into his life, his bed.

"What was it?" he said, and Sid sighed against his neck.

"Well, way back - there was the city, and the - the anglerfish, let's call them. They'd come onto land in the winter, when it was cold, to - hunt. They, uh. I think - intelligent prey - tasted better to them." Zhenya shuddered, and Sid gently smoothed a hand down his back. "But the people - the indigenous people - the Mi'kmaq - they learned when they came and they'd go camp in the interior in the winters. So the anglerfish could only prey on the outcasts, the lost, that sort of thing. I mean it was horrible, obviously. But then the Europeans came. I mean, the Mi'kmaq tried to tell them, obviously, but I expect you can guess how that worked out. At first the people lost to the anglerfish were blamed on the Mi'kmaq, and it was - well, it wasn't good. So the anglerfish glutted themselves like they'd never done before. And that went on for years, because new fleets kept coming, for the fishing. You see, Nova Scotia fishing - "

"I know about the fishing," Zhenya interrupted, and Sid made the same face he always made when people stopped him talking about how great Nova Scotia was. "You can take me there and feed me lobster and talk, okay, tell me about - " he hesitated, and Sid nodded.

"Well, you see, it's hunting, but it's not just hunting. It's, uh," he shot a look at Zhenya and briefly caught his lip between his teeth. "It's like anglerfish because it's mating, too. What they - absorb - becomes part of them, and part of their children. And now they were eating humans all winter. So their young were... more human. A lot more human. Some of them could mate the human way, too, so - people on the shore were having children who were. Mixed up."

Well. That made sense. You didn't get something as human as Sid without a lot of interbreeding.

"So you are human, a lot," Geno said, and Sid nodded.

"I mean, I am - probably more than half, but." He took a deep breath. "I won't, uh. Always look like this. See, when we're born human, we start out really human, and we... change. One day, I'll be, uh. A fish person. And go live in the water."

"When?" Zhenya said, suddenly horrified. "Sid! We have to win cups!"

"Oh god, G, not that soon. Not for... maybe a hundred years." He caught Geno's expression, and added, "We live, uh. A long time. But that's okay - they play hockey there, you know."

"How the fuck do they play hockey there," Zhenya said, feebly. Of course they played hockey, but he'd assumed Sid had added that to his weird fish city. The idea strange fishy beings were even now playing hockey in dark undersea arenas was _weird as fuck_.

"Oh, the Mi'kmaq invented hockey - " Sid started, and Zhenya put a hand over his mouth.

"No, Russia invented hockey," he said, because there was blasphemous knowledge and then there was _that_. Sid giggled.

"Well, maybe they did too," he said, generously. Zhenya allowed it. "Anyway, it got passed to the Europeans and then I guess... absorbed?"

"So whose dream did I see?" Zhenya said, and Sid winced. "Sid?"

"We live a _really_ long time," Sid said. "So, uh. Eventually the human-fish crosses on both sides managed to negotiate agreements where they wouldn't... hunt... any more. But the elders... they're still there. Down in the sea."

"They don't hunt?" Zhenya checked, and Sid made a face.

"They don't hunt humans," he agreed. "They, uh. We don't really talk about it, but I think some of them think the treaty is just a temporary thing. That eventually humans will be, uh, prey again."

Zhenya thought about the resources humans could bring to bear on an undersea city; then he thought about the sea rising, enveloping the land. About a future where humans didn't have nearly so many resources. 

He remembered the vast shape floating over the city, and wondered how many of them there were, waiting patiently down in the deep for the empires of man to fall.

"Geno?" Sid said, tentatively, and Zhenya realised he'd tightened his grip again. "Is it - okay?" 

It wasn't really okay; Zhenya was pretty sure he'd get sucked into some nightmares in the future. But he and Sid were okay, and that was a lot.

"It's okay," he said, and kissed Sid's brow. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Sid said. He was still pink, and Zhenya kissed either cheek.

"You're not gross," he said. "You can look - " he gestured, vaguely, and Sid went pinker and touched his own face.

"Oh, uh," he said, and after a second, he changed. Zhenya's breath caught, but Sid was looking steadily up at him, so he forced himself not to recoil. 

It was still Sid. The nose was noticeably flatter and shorter, the mouth improbably wide, the skin not human shades at all, green-grey and dappled with darker patches. The eyes were rounder, but still that pale golden-brown. His body was - different, but he was still in clothes so Geno couldn't assess the differences.

His hair and ears were gone entirely, and after a careful moment's consideration, Zhenya cupped the curve of his skull in one hand. It was cooler and slicker than human skin, like a snake's scaled body.

"You go bald, so sad," he said when he was sure his voice would come out normal. Sid swatted him gently; his fingers were webbed and claw-tipped. "This is... how you'll end up?"

"Not quite," Sid said. "This is about the point when I'll start living permanently in the sea. After that it gets - weirder."

"Huh." Zhenya would, after all, probably be dead by then. He kissed Sid on the brow again, and found it wasn't horrible. Just Sid, cold like he'd been in an ice bath. "Hey. Show me your dick."

"I am not showing you my dick," Sid said, and his skin rippled and shivered like water, back to the faintly-yellow Sid with the not-quite-right mouth. "You're obsessed with my dick."

"It's such a nice dick," Zhenya coaxed, but Sid just laughed at him.

*

Flower gave him a thumbs up next day, and muttered, "Moony shit," when they passed in the line for the breakfast buffet. That was good; Zhenya didn't want to get stabbed. Sid and Letang were having a conversation in what Zhenya thought was French, judging by the intense concentration on Sid's face. Well, they could use a D-man for some of the drills. Zhenya could live with it.

*

"So your dick," Zhenya said, in the city. He thought he'd left it a discreet amount of time, but Sid's skin still went a weird blotchy shade. "Is that... do you... how does it work."

"Oh wow, we're not talking about this," Sid said, skating away, but Zhenya gave chase, nipping at his heels, crowding him, until he was giggly again. "Fuck off," he said, and Zhenya tried to pin him against a wall, defeated by the impressive power of Sid's ass. "Why are you obsessed with my dick?"

"It's nice," Zhenya said, and Sid didn't shove him away, let Zhenya nuzzle at his throat. "Remember when I touched you inside?" Sid's breath stuttered a little and Zhenya grinned against his skin. "You liked it so much," he murmured against Sid's ear, and Sid sighed, shivery.

"You'll. Freak out again," he said unwillingly, and Zhenya huffed.

"Never!" he said, and Sid pulled away enough to give him a sceptical look. "Well. Sex is always sticky and weird, right? The first time I heard of anal I thought it was the most disgusting thing. There's shit in there, you know? But I got over it."

"Wow, I always wanted a guy who'd get over my dick being weird," Sid said, but there were dimples forming no matter how hard he pressed his lips together. Zhenya kissed the corners of his mouth, coaxing.

"I don't know how weird til you show me," he said. "But it's you. If it's too weird, we won't do it, but I won't freak out."

"Well," Sid said, and wriggled indecisively. "You promise?"

"Promise," Zhenya said, and held his breath until Sid gave a tiny grudging nod. "When?"

"Well," Sid said, and the dream shivered and warped around them. It started to build into a beige-walled hotel room, and Geno groaned and _reached_ , taking firm control of the dream and making it over. His own bedroom, in Russia, in his own apartment he'd bought when he'd decided he needed _privacy_. It was mostly for sex, so the bed was gigantic. "I didn't know you could do that," Sid said suspiciously, and Zhenya shrugged.

"You let me," he said, which was true. Sid could have fought him for control of his dream, but he'd let go easily.

"This is yours," Sid said, squirming out of Zhenya's grip to go poke around. "It's, uh, bright."

"Colour is nice, you're boring," Zhenya said, and detached his hands from the chest of drawers to drag him over to the bed. "Come on, we're having sex, you've seen all my t-shirts."

"I've never had sex in a dream," Sid admitted, "But - well, I've never really. Done the, uh, dick stuff? So I thought maybe dreams would be better."

"Right," Zhenya agreed. You could still feel pain in dreams, but soreness wouldn't last. And if Sid liked screwing in dreams, they could do it way more, so really everything was coming up roses. He put his hands down at Sid's waist; he was still wearing hockey pants, but it all pushed down over his hips like sweatpants and vanished away before it had reached his knees. Sid half pulled-off, half un-imagined his jersey and pads, and then he was naked and sleek and a little bit fishy above Geno. His hair was gone again, and Zhenya had a moment's regret; those thick curls made for great handholds.

But it was fine. Zhenya liked fishy Sid just fine. He leaned up to kiss Sid's chest, and then realised he didn't have nipples any more, or a navel.

"Sad," he said, and touched Sid's pec, just where his nipple had used to be. Sid squirmed, and Geno brightened. "Oh, still sensitive?"

"Not... _as_ sensitive," Sid said. "But yeah."

The hollows above and below his collarbones were more sensitive, too, and while he didn't have a navel any more, there were little raised patches along his hips, more angular and pronounced in his form, that were tender to the point of ticklishness. Sid giggled and slapped at him, his webbed hands making a loud noise, like walking in flippers. Zhenya couldn't help but laugh back.

"Giggle stays the same," he teased, and Sid scrunched his short flat nose.

"It's the worst," he said, still grinning. "You, uh. You wanna. Look at my dick?"

Zhenya hadn't wanted to rush into it - he had a little bit of subtlety, he wasn't a horny teenager any more - but he really did. He curled his hand around it, and was surprised by how stiff it felt; it was much shorter than Sid's usual erection. Thicker, too, and the opening - 

It was soft and pink and inviting, and Zhenya rubbed at it with his fingertip and watched it unfurl. His heartbeat skittered; this was definitely the weirdest thing about Sid's fishy, human body. 

"What do I do?" he said, voice thin, and Sid's cool hand came to rest on the back of his neck. 

"Just uh, pet it," he said. "It's sensitive. It'll, uh, it'll open on its own."

Zhenya had thought it was already open, but as he teased at it, it swelled and flowered, the shaft getting thicker and thicker, the opening pinker and wetter. More like a cunt that a cock, almost. He carefully pushed his fingertip against it, and it went in smooth and easy, and Sid squeaked.

"Okay?" Zhenya said, going still. He could feel the tiny nodules inside, digging gently into his skin, like they were mouthing at him.

"Yeaaah," Sid said. His eyes were shut; there were gills fluttering on the sides of his throat, and Zhenya was briefly transfixed by them before remembering he had his finger _inside_ Sid's dick. He pushed it a little further in, and and it went in so sweet and easy he kept pushing until he was buried to the last knuckle. "Oh, that's good," Sid said. "Mmm." His thighs spread open, and the muscles of his belly rippled; a moment later there was a ripple around Zhenya's finger, like it was swallowing around him.

"Is it," Zhenya said, and swallowed. He couldn't get over the sight of Sid's dick folded like a pink mouth around his finger, and he could feel it working him inside, little grinding motions like it was gnawing painlessly on him. "Can I - does it get big enough - "

"You can fuck it," Sid said, opening his eyes. "I thought that was what you wanted?"

"Yes," Zhenya said, quickly, "Yes please, Sid, that's - " he drew his finger out to the tip, feeling the resistant clutch of the tiny teeth, and then pushed it in again. "Fuck."

"That's, uh," Sid threw an arm over his face. "That's how we, uh. How we do it. Now. You know."

Zhenya slid two fingers in this time, and it - Sid's cock - latched onto him and worried at him. He licked his lips.

"You eat people," he said finally, and Sid made a hilariously affronted face. Zhenya found he didn't feel worried at all; he was sure that whatever Sid did, it wasn't cruel or brutal, and he wouldn't do it to Zhenya if he didn't want it.

"We don't _eat_ people, G, come on," he said. "We just - we just uh, we - " he scowled when Zhenya laughed at him. "We take people in," he said, finally. "I told you, it's like - mating. Becoming one."

"How is that different from eating," Zhenya said, and Sid huffed.

"It just is," he said. "They're not destroyed, and they have some influence over the body - uh, the - it's two minds, but one flesh."

"Two headed monster?" Zhenya said, dryly, and Sid started to laugh, the soft cavity rippling around Zhenya's fingers as he did so. Geno bit his lip and pressed back, and Sid's laughter stuttered and became a moan. "No screaming?"

"No," Sid said, when his breathing settled. 

"And you're not do to me," Zhenya checked, because safe sex meant asking those sorts of questions. Sid rolled his eyes, but he didn't seem to mind much.

"We've been together like two months, I'm not proposing." He paused. "I mean - one day. I'll probably want to, with a person. If they get old, and - I can keep them with me, that way."

Zhenya thought of living in the underwater city, forever, watching humanity with distant interest. It wasn't exactly appealing, but all his life he'd seen coaches crack their joints and move slowly in the mornings, limp on bad knees and shake out tricky wrists. He wondered if there would come a time when he'd be happy to bury himself in Sid's immortal body, see through his glossy fish eyes and swim down to the sea bed together.

"You're thinking about it too much," Sid said softly. Like he could think of anything else, like this, Sid's webbed toes resting on his calf and those tiny teeth working against his fingers, mutely demanding. "You wanna fuck me? You don't have to do it like this - "

"I want," Zhenya said, because he did. He wanted to feel that on his dick, and he didn't want to wonder about it any more. He was naked; he couldn't remember when that happened, but that didn't matter. Sid lifted his knees and arms to cradle Geno, and pulled him in, wrapping him up, his hands covering almost all of Geno's wide shoulders.

"It takes a while," Sid murmured in his ear. "It takes time. You don't have to worry."

"Not worried," Zhenya said. It was a dream, after all. And anyway, Sid would have a very awkward conversation with management if he ate Zhenya.

His dick was nudging against Sid's, it took him a moment to adjust, find where to press, and then he slipped right in, and Sid opened impossibly wide and deep, so deep Zhenya froze, sure that he must be hurting Sid in some way.

Sid just sighed, though, his clawed fingers tiny pinpricks of almost-pain on Geno's skin. He was built for this, Zhenya reasoned, he wasn't human, Zhenya wasn't actually buried deep in his gut like some horrific insect piercing him. Still, he couldn't move until he felt Sid move around him, those little gnawing movements against his dick.

"Oh fuck," he said, and clutched tighter at Sid. It was a terrifying, overwhelming, _amazing_ experience; his body knew that whatever he had stuck his dick in was _not right_ , but it felt so fucking good. 

Something lapped at the head of his dick, something like a small pointed tongue, and Zhenya wondered wildly what the hell was inside Sid. Sid himself was lax under Zhenya, his eyes half-shut, looking as blissed out as Geno had ever seen him.

"You feel so good," he sighed. "You have such a nice dick, you know? I love the way you taste." The tiny interior tendril pressed against Zhenya's slit, pushed him open and slipped inside, and Zhenya let out a strangled moan. Sid's eyes opened a little more. "Is this okay?" he said, and Zhenya jerked his chin down. It was okay. It was _terrifying_ , he felt as though his bones were dissolving, he felt half-devoured already, but he trusted Sid. 

And it felt so good, Sid around him and inside him, stroking him in places he'd never been touched before. His heart was pounding so hard his veins ached, and he wondered if his body, back in its bed, was sweating and panting like this one was. He'd never felt realer in a dream.

Something pressed against his hips, small somethings, and he glanced down to find that the tender raised spots on Sid's flanked were swollen, little inch-long protrusions that reached for him and prodded at him.

"One day, they'll be tentacles," Sid confided in a slow, syrupy voice, as dreamy and dazed as Zhenya felt. "That takes time. That's really far on. When I'm almost ready to, you know. Absorb."

"Fuck," Zhenya said, and when a little dent appeared between Sid's brows, he said, "Tentacles? Hot, Sid," and Sid snickered. 

"This is amazing," he said. "Zhenya, I can feel you. I can feel you so deep, I can - can feel what it would be like."

 _I want you with me,_ came through, loud and clear, and Zhenya shuddered. The feeling of Sid's mind against his, warm and pleased, was just as good without the tang of blood. _Oh, you do like it. You like me_ , Sid thought, wondering and pleased, and suddenly he flexed more tightly around Zhenya, and it was like a fist closing, the teeth around his dick working at him, pulling, the narrow tendril snaking deeper. Zhenya put his face into the space between Sid's shoulder and neck, grateful for the coolness of his skin, and Sid's body worked him insistently. He should do something for Sid, but he could only take it, let Sid cradle him and care for him. _This is perfect you're perfect_ Sid thought, and Zhenya moaned helplessly and spilled himself into Sid's body,

He felt like his flesh was unwinding, coming loose from his bones; that they were underwater again, the current making his weightless body sway. If this was what it was like to be absorbed, Zhenya thought, it wasn't so terrible.

 _It's not terrible_ Sid thought, and his mind was overflowing with warm contentment, bumping up against Zhenya's consciousness like an importuning cat. _But we should probably stop_.

Zhenya grumbled silently, but he could already feel that the edges of their minds were starting to wash together. He loved Sid, but he still didn't want a telepathic link with him.

Sid's grey flesh flushed rose-tinted, and he sent back a wave of inarticulate adoration. Zhenya concentrated on disentangling his dick from the determined grip of Sid's body, and not his own strong and embarrassing emotions.

The link faded as soon as they were apart, and he was left with Sid squirmily happy, nuzzling at him with his weird little fish-nose. Zhenya kissed the snub tip of it, and it was no worse than kissing Sid's big human nose. 

"I maybe miss the hair," Zhenya admitted, stroking his bare scalp. "Your curls are cute."

"You might go bald too," Sid said cheerfully. "So it's okay."

"Fuck you," Zhenya said with dignity.


End file.
